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The TSA agent is staring at him, scowling at the passport, then looking at him again. He pauses, stands, and walks over to another desk with the passport.
Are they here now? Are they hiding? The inward scream makes me feel like I'm going to faint. He leans forward, asks Torin a few questions, then nods and scans the passport. My heart is beating so fast the nausea roils in my belly again.
Bleep. The green checkmark comes, and Torin walks through as if he didn't just move heaven and earth with his fraud.
“Move,” somebody says behind me. “I have a flight to catch.”
God, so do I. I make it through security, and then Torin appears at my side.
“You talking disrespectfully to my wife?” he says in a low, dangerous voice.
“No, man,” the guy says, holding his hands up. “She was just taking way too fucking long.”
“And you're the judge of that?” Torin growls, tipping his head to the side. It's threatening as fuck.
“Apologize,” Torin says, and he's so big and intimidating that the guy immediately obeys.
“I’m sorry,” he says, cheeks flaming.
After we leave security, I breathe freely again.
A family with too much luggage is trying to rearrange it in front of us and losing it. People are sleeping across chairs, but the check-in desk for our flight is quiet. The gate is mostly empty this close to boarding.
“Last call for boarding.”
We stand. I pick up my bag, and Torin picks up his. Then he goes still for half a second, one hand going to his jacket, and he takes something out—small, black, the size of a coin. The tracker.
He opens the case.
Torin slides the case into his pocket. “Come after us, motherfuckers,” he says quietly to no one in particular.
“You're talking to the tracker.”
His lips quirk up. “Aye, lass.”
I take the window seat, and he takes the aisle. A child sleeps a few rows up, and a man in a suit is reorganizing his laptop bag—it’s all kind of normal, the mundane facts of a world that just keeps going, while mine has been turned on its head.
But right now, I breathe easier. It’s the first time I’ve been around normal, ordinary people in weeks. I could cry.
The engines roar.
“You nervous about flying?” he asks quietly.
I shake my head. “I don't like it, but I don't hate it. Are you?”
“No.”
I think about the tracker, now live in his pocket, and how they're going to see that little red flash flying across an ocean.
“How will you deal with the… complications that followed us out?”
He closes his eyes as the flight attendants go over the safety demonstration. “I have a way.”
He always seems to.
I close my eyes like him.
“How are you feeling?”
